10 Scientifically proven ways to be more attractive to the opposite sex

Research from the University of Leeds showed that people with white teeth are considered more attractive. The researchers even compared the signal of white teeth to a peacock's tail: a striking, difficult to fake sign of good health. The idea behind it is that tooth color says something about nutrition, care and overall health, so we unconsciously take it as a signal. Less coffee and cigarettes, in other words, although this is of course only one predictor of many who find someone attractive.

A study with the telling title “Happy Guys Finish Last: The Impact of Emotion Expressions on Sexual Attraction” examined how different emotional expressions influenced the attractiveness of men and women. For women, a happy, smiling appearance was found to be most attractive. That in itself is not surprising: in almost every social-psychological study, a smile is associated with accessibility and warmth. Above all, it confirms that this general finding also applies within the specific domain of romantic attraction.

The same research, supplemented by a study from the University of British Columbia, showed the opposite picture in men: a visibly happy, smiling expression scored relatively low, while pride or a more serious look scored higher. A possible explanation is that pride and a serious appearance in men are associated with status and self-confidence, qualities that in evolutionary psychological research are more often considered attractive in men than in women. Please note: these are findings from specific experimental settings, not a hard and fast rule that applies to everyone and every context.

A study from the University of Texas examined which qualities men find attractive in women, depending on whether they were looking for a serious relationship or a short-term adventure. In the latter scenario, certain playful, carefree signals appeared to score higher than in the search for a long-term partner. This is often simplified in popular summaries to “women should pretend to be dumber”, but that is too rough a translation of what the study actually measured. It mainly says something about how people, consciously or unconsciously, send and value different signals depending on what they are looking for at that moment, not that genuine intelligence would be unattractive in any way.

Research into beards and attractiveness has been producing conflicting results for years, and that's no coincidence: the outcome depends heavily on the type of facial hair shown and whether women envision a short-term or long-term relationship. Large-scale research from the University of Queensland, with more than 8,500 female participants, found that heavy stubble tended to score best for attractiveness in general and for short-term relationships, while full beards scored higher for long-term relationships. However, virtually no study finds that a completely shaven face convincingly “wins” over any form of facial hair, as is sometimes claimed. What is widely found is that men with beards are more often estimated as more dominant, older and of higher social status than clean-shaven men. In short: beards send social signals, but what counts as “attractive” varies greatly by context, by woman and even by phase of her cycle, according to some of these studies.

Research published in PLoS ONE showed that a higher intake of fruit and vegetables is associated with a more attractive skin color. Fruit and vegetables are full of carotenoids, pigments that give the skin a subtle, healthy glow. The study showed that a few extra portions of fruit or vegetables per day had a noticeable effect on how attractive the skin of participants was judged to be. It's one of the better-replicated findings on this list: the link between carotenoids and healthy-looking skin color has been confirmed in multiple independent studies.

One of the best-substantiated findings in this entire field of research concerns facial symmetry. Multiple independent studies and meta-analyses, including work by researcher Gillian Rhodes, consistently show that faces made more symmetrical by blending them with their own reflection score higher in attractiveness than the originals. That effect was found in both Western and non-Western participants, indicating that it is not purely a culturally learned preference. More recent research clarifies exactly which mechanism is decisive: some studies find that not symmetry itself, but “averageness” of facial features, how close a face is to the statistical average of a large group of faces, is the stronger predictor of attractiveness. Symmetrical faces often happen to be more average, which explains why both factors often appear together in research. Regardless, this is one of the few findings in this field that has been robustly, replicated, and cross-culturally confirmed.

Research by Erin Whitchurch, Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert, among others, published in Psychological Science, showed that women rated a man more attractive when they were unsure about how much he liked them, compared to when they were sure he liked them very much. The explanation given by the researchers is that uncertainty causes people to think about the other person for longer, which can strengthen attraction. That is an interesting psychological finding, although it is not a license to act structurally distant or ambiguous, long-term uncertainty in a relationship usually has a negative effect on trust and well-being.

Researchers from Nottingham Trent University found that women rated men wearing a T-shirt with a large letter “T” about 12 percent more attractive than the same men in a plain shirt. The explanation lies in an optical illusion: the horizontal line of the “T” emphasizes the width of the shoulders, while the vertical line makes the waist appear narrower. This enhances the classic V-shaped silhouette that is often associated with male attractiveness, without changing anything to the body itself.

Of all the findings on this list, this is perhaps the most repeatedly confirmed: women generally rate lower-pitched male voices as more attractive, while men prefer slightly higher pitches for female voices. This pattern has been demonstrated in dozens of experiments in which researchers digitally turned up or down the pitch of the same voice, and has been confirmed in a large study of more than 3,100 participants across 22 countries. Interesting detail: for short-term contexts, preferences sometimes shift slightly, so a higher female voice appears to be slightly more attractive for short encounters. For more serious, long-term relationships, the low male voice/high female voice preference is strongest. Just like with beards, not only the trait itself, but also the type of relationship someone is looking for, seems to play a role in what is perceived as attractive. Take all these findings as they are intended: fun insights into psychological research, not as hard instructions for who you should be. Most of these studies are relatively small, culture-specific, and measure snapshots in an experiment, not how attraction actually works in real life, over time and with a complete person involved.